4 MARCH 1865, Page 19

Cecil Forrester. By Frederick Sheridan. Two vols. (T. Cantley Newby.)—The

principal character in this worthless novel is the wicked lord who marries a dressmaker under a false name, and deserts her, and attempts to murder her child, and suborns people to accuse her of child- murder, of which she is convicted; and then, when she is dead, he mar- , ries again, and ill-treats his wife, and keeps a mistress, and when his son by the dressmaker tarns up tries to murder him again by sending him out in a leaky boat, and succeeds in murdering not only him, but also the son by the second wife, and poisons himself. Why the detective who identified the Cecil Forrester who-deserted his wife with the Marquis of

Langmuir at the end of the book did not do it at the beginning it is im- possible to say, except that if he had this fifty times repeated rubbish could not have been made to fill even the indispensable two volumes of a novel.